Language is, and has always been, an essential tool of man. It's uses are many and varied. It serves as a means of communication; as a means for making a record of historical, scientific and other happenings; as an essential part of instruction; as an entertainer, as a thought challenger, and in a host of other ways.
Cavemen used pictures to record their ideas. These pictographs or ideograms roughly drawn upon the walls of caves, attempted to show, through the mental and physical means then available, important events, happenings and the like.
Wedge shaped cuneiform characters, inscribed upon clay tablets was the form of the written language used by people in ancient Babylonia, Assyria, Persia and the surrounding area. While the Egyptians developed a language in the form of a system of symbols called hieroglyphics. However, only the very learned were able to write and decipher such languages. They were not for the masses; and so followed the development of language created from systems of symbols or alphabets representing sounds.
The Chinese language, for example, utilizes characters described as pictographic; but they only represented materiality. Something was needed to represent abstract relations, space, intellect, volition or affections. To accomplish this, Chinese language requires complex methods such as ideographic, suggestive, ideographic-phonetic, phonetic loan, derivative, and the like to construct the letters (symbols). The Chinese classification writing words, however, included many errors and things were improperly classified because of mistaken concepts or understandings.
The early scholars created a classification system for animals and plants. Latin and Greek words were combined in what is referred to as a binomial system of nomenclature; and each plant and animal was defined by two names. However, this is inadequate, from a classification point of view, since the names so applied to a particular plant or animal only defined part of its distinguishing characteristics. For example, animals in the dog family such as the fox and the wolf are named thusly:
Dog--Canis familiaris PA1 Fox--Canis vulgaris PA1 Wolf--Canis lupus PA1 Cat--Felis domestica PA1 Lion--Felis leo PA1 Tiger--Felis tigoris PA1 Leopard--Felis leopardus
while those in the cat family are names as follows:
But the dog and cat family are defined by distinguishing characteristics such as: animal, vertebrata, mammalia, placentalis, canivora, fissipedia, and such is not indicated by the classification type binomial system of language.
Language has been developed to facilitate reading and writing. The symbols (alphabets) utilized facilitate pronouncing the symbols and the words created by combining the symbols. But most languages utilized today do not, in and of themselves, facilitate understanding the full meaning or definition of the word from a recognition of the symbols selected to create or make up the word.